Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/149

 if his father does do business on a large scale—and a broker who has been on ’Change for twenty years.

I must tell you that I knew he had learnt by heart—he says “outwardly”—all sorts of verse-trash, and as verses always contain lies, I was sure that sooner or later I should catch him in an untruth. Nor was it long before I did. I was sitting in the morning-room, and he was in the drawing-room for we have a drawing-room. Mary was knitting, and he was just going to tell her something. I listened attentively, and when he had finished, I asked him whether he had the book from which he had read the thing he had just droned. He said yes, and brought it to me. It was a part of the works of a man named Heine. The day after I gave him—I mean Stern—the following:

Mary, Do your old people know of that, and Louisa Rosemeyer? Is it decent to say this to a child that quite readily may become disobedient to her mother through it, as she may take it into her head that she is of age, when someone calls her What does it mean: bearing her on wings? You have no wings, and your song hasn’t either. Just try to cross the Laurier Canal, which isn’t even very wide. But even if you had wings, are you at liberty to propose such things to a young girl who has not yet been confirmed? And even if the child were a full member of the Church, what is the meaning of that offer to fly away together? Fie!

Then why don’t you go there alone and hire a flat? but don’t take a young girl with you whose duty it is to help her mother in